The present invention relates to data processing, and more specifically, to the cache set replacement order of data elements in a set-associative cache based on temporal recording information.
A cache is a component that transparently retains data elements (or simply data) so that future requests for any retained data can be served faster. A data element that is stored within a cache corresponds to a pre-defined storage location within a computer system. Such data element might be a value that has recently been computed or a duplicate copy of the same storage location that are also stored elsewhere. If requested data is contained in the cache, this is a cache hit, and this request can be served by simply reading the cache, which is comparatively faster since the cache is usually built close to its requester. Otherwise, if the data is not contained in the cache, this is a cache miss, and the data has to be fetched from other storage medium not necessarily close to the requester, and thus is comparatively slower. In general, the greater the number of requests that can be served from the cache, the faster the overall system performance becomes.